As my Surface didn’t arrive on launch day, I had nothing better to do on a Friday night so here’s a blog post on Azure configuration settings. Prior to Azure, web.config was the place ASP.NET devs would store settings. However, as you should consider web.config read-only in Azure, you should use the Azure .cscfg instead IF…

Here’s a simple Powershell script I wrote to re-install the Nuget packages that are associated with the current Visual Studio solution. In case you’re wondering why you might want to do this, I often create backups of code that I’m working on. I deliberately exclude the “packages” folder from the backup so I keep the backup…

Did you know that, by default, IIS will shutdown your site upon the following events? a) After being idle for 20 minutes.b) Every 29 hours (due to recycling). The first vistor to your site after one of these events will encounter a poor user experience (slow response) whilst a new IIS app pool is initialised. …

I’ve built a few machines for SharePoint 2010 development lately so I thought I’d make a note of my key learnings for my future benefit and, hopefully, the benefit of others also. Note, the following comments are only appropriate to a DEVELOPMENT environment. PRODUCTION environments should follow deployment documentation on Technet. Firstly, some assumptions: You really need…

“Inspired” by a pub discussion with a mate last night, I finally got around to doing a “hello world” ASP.NET->SQL sample on Azure today. Unfortunately, I couldn’t leave it up as I don’t want it to start accruing charges. However, I included a screen capture of it running below! I set it up under the…

Thought I’d share that I noticed that the videos from the sessions at MIX10 are freely available at: http://live.visitmix.com/Videos For those unfamiliar with MIX10, it’s a “conference for web designers and developers building the world’s most innovative web sites”. I’m planning to incorporate watching some of these videos into my ongoing training plan….

I was recently working on a SharePoint Application Page and encountered an issue whereby button clicks were only working for the first click. The second and subsequent clicks weren’t working. The issue appears to be due to SharePoint interfering with the JavaScript that is necessary to process an ASP.NET post-back. Anyway, adding an OnClientClick attribute…

After installing Win7 RC on my production Media Center box (ie the box I literally can’t watch TV without) I noticed an annoying problem. The skip forward & back buttons didn’t work! At first I feared the issue was an intended “by design” change. After all, I’m sure the commercial TV networks don’t like us skipping over…

A cool new feature in Windows7 & Server 2008 R2 is the ability to boot from a .vhd file! Having your OS isolated to a .vhd file has a number of advantages including but not limited to:- easier to backup, – multi-boot scenarios that are more isolated from each other,- ability to trial new builds on your…

I noticed SQL updates (KB960089 but also SQL SP3) were failing to apply on the WSS Developer VM. After many hours of frustration, I located this great blog post that helped me to overcome the issue: http://blogs.msdn.com/sqlserverfaq/archive/2009/01/30/part-1-sql-server-2005-patch-fails-to-install-with-an-error-unable-to-install-windows-installer-msp-file.aspx In my case, the missing .msi’s were from SQL Developer edition. The missing .msp’s were from SQL SP2…